


these teeth aren't sharp enough for flesh

by cherrybomb



Category: Kings
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-13
Updated: 2014-01-13
Packaged: 2018-01-08 14:12:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1133598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherrybomb/pseuds/cherrybomb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He was told to bury himself and he couldn't do it, so his father did it for him."</p><p>Jack and Lucinda's imprisonment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	these teeth aren't sharp enough for flesh

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to be sad about Jack Benjamin for the rest of my life, and writing depressing stories about him isn't going to help but whatever. Also I wanted to see more of Lucinda without her fawning over Jack so yeah.
> 
> This is not beta read, feel free to point out any mistakes although I do hope there aren't many.

In the story books princes always had blond hair, blue eyes, an unwavering moral compass, and a beautiful, female true love. His mother had reassured him that stories were just that – stories, that princes like that didn't really exist, and that if he wanted to see a real prince all he had to do was look in the mirror. He believed her, too, until he was tied up in an enemy tent, and through the bandages covering his face and the blood dripping into his eyes he managed to glimpse what he was led to believe didn't exist: a prince.

Jack was not a prince in anything but title. He knew this, he'd always known this. He knew it when he was six, stealing toys from his sister out of spite, he knew it when he was ten, pushing the smallest kid in his class into the mud, he knew it when he was thirteen, sticking his tongue in the mouth of another boy. Princes in story books didn't do these things, and yet the king's son did.

Jack had dark hair, cold gray eyes, a moral compass that pointed in the direction of whoever gave him the biggest scrap of attention, and his love would always be a lie. Everything about him was a lie, carefully constructed by his mother and Thomasina and every member of the staff who ever tightened his tie and told him to smile.

David Shepherd was a perfect prince. David Shepherd didn't need anyone to tighten his tie or cover up his bruises. David Shepherd was born knowing what was right, and how to act on what was right, and people knew it, and loved him for it. Jack knew it, and Jack hated him for it.

Jack might have known what was right, once, but he was taught to bite his tongue and bury it. He learned what would benefit public opinion and pander to people with enough money to warrant that sort of treatment, to do what was good for the treasury, not for the people. It was a lesson taught with cutting words and bruises in places people couldn't see, and around the time he was supposed to start using these lessons to make political decisions David fucking Shepherd waltzed in and started making right decisions. Decisions that Jack is sure he could have made if the ability to do so hadn't been educated out of him.

His father started looking at him with questioning eyes, clearly wondering why Jack couldn't think like David Shepherd. Jack wanted to explode, to scream and cry that it wasn't his fault, that his father was the one who skinned his soul and left him with nothing left but hatred and cruelty and a desperate need for approval. He didn't cry out, though. He buried his jealousy of David in the hole in his heart where Joseph once fit, the place where he had always hidden his shame. He'd keep it there for now, and release his anger once it came to light that David was just as petty as the rest of them. No one is that good.

It was during the trial, when David pleaded guilty to a crime he did not commit for which the punishment would be death, simply because Jack's father had told him it was right for the country, that Jack came to terms with the fact that David was better than the rest of them. He had been touched by their dirty hands and walked away clean, and for the first ever Jack knew what was right and he did it.

Of course, after that he went right back to obeying the one person who told him he would be king, and for some stupid reason he'd believed him.

Even if his uncle's scheme had worked, he never would have been king, not truly. There was nothing true about him, or about the situation. He had dug inside himself and buried everything until nothing was left to be crowned, and if there had been a scrap of man left then the crown would still have been fake.

“Keep it,” his father had said, tossing it at his feet the only time he ever came to visit Jack in his imprisonment. “A false crown for the faggot king.”

**

The room Lucinda and Jack were stuck in was nice, at first. They were only left there for one week, a week in which Jack stared blankly at the ceiling and Lucinda asked him constant, confused questions, none of which he acknowledged.

After a week they were moved to a smaller room with cement floors and nothing but a bed and a bathroom. Lucinda stopped asking questions and cried quietly instead. Her sobs were muffled in a way that takes practice, she cried silently the same way he had learned to as a child, hiding just around the corner from someone who would disapprove of tears.

When she stopped crying she sat next to him, back against the cold wall, and stared at the single slot in the door where the light got in.

“Why are we here?” She asked. Her voice was raw, not sugary sweet and smooth like it used to be, and Jack reveled in it.

After a moment, he answered, coughing a few times first to get his voice back. “To produce an heir.”

She breathed in sharply through her nose. “And if we do, they'll let us go?”

Jack shrugged. He was done trying to understand his father's thoughts and actions. “They might let you go, after it's born. Or they'll kill you. They'll probably leave me here.”

“And they'll...take it? The child?” Her voice sounded small, and Jack took a moment to marvel at the cruelty his father was willing to inflict on an innocent woman just to torture him. He tried to bury the guilt he felt about his part in what happened to her, to push it aside, but then stopped. There was no reason to bury it. He deserved to feel every drop of guilt, he deserved to have it coursing through his veins. He deserved to drown in it.

“Yes.”

Lucinda pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, her head tilting back to rest against the wall.

“What a stupid plan,” Lucinda said. Jack blinked at her in surprise and felt his lips twitch, just barely. “I mean, even if you got me pregnant, what if I only have girls? What if you snapped and strangled me? What if I had a son who was...” she waved her hand around vaguely, “you know. Like you.”

“You mean a fag?”

“Well, yes, but,” her brow furrowed, “I mean, I wouldn't mind. If I had a son like that. I imagine your father would mind.”

“He did. Does.” Jack turned his head toward her and looked at her, truly looked at her, for the first time since they were locked up together. She was smaller than he remembered. “It doesn't matter anymore.”

“Right. Because we're going to rot down here.”

“You could always kill me,” he said, staring into her eyes. “They'd probably do something with you then.”

**

Someone somewhere came to the conclusion that they were never going to produce an heir. The cell had probably been bugged, since the day after Lucinda announced she would rather rot than give a child to King Silas they were moved to a smaller, danker cell so deep underground he was certain they would never see the light of day again.

He was told to bury himself and he couldn't do it, so his father did it for him.

When he started spending too long watching the shadows from the torch in the hall flickering on the wall Lucinda started telling him stories about her family. They were dysfunctional in the way that they all had half a pharmacy prescribed to them by a psychiatrist due to the issues they gave each other but still managed to get through holidays together. She wondered what they thought had happened to her. Jack nearly told her they were probably dead, but half a second before he said it the thought 'David wouldn't say that' flashed through his mind and he told her they had probably been told she was sent away for her own protection.

**

Lucinda was a smart girl, which was why he wasn't the least bit surprised when she told him she had never been in love with him.

“My family is bankrupt,” she admitted three weeks (He thinks it's been three weeks. He's starting to lose count.) into their imprisonment. “If you hadn't proposed my dad had three other men for me to charm into an engagement.”

“I should have known you were too smart to love me,” Jack said. She didn't smile, like he was trying to make her to. Instead she reached out and touched his face softly, stroking his temple.

“I do love you, now,” she said. “The kind of love that means if we have to stay down here forever I'm happy it's with you, not the kind of love that produces children.”

He tried to reject this, to spit her love back in her face, because he didn't deserve it. He couldn't bring himself to do it, and not just because his throat was suddenly to tight for any words to get through. Her love made him feel warm despite the cold level of hell they were stuck in. It unearthed things he thought he had buried too deep to retrieve. His heart burned in a way it hadn't since David's trial and he was almost certain he loved her back.

Her fingertips moved from his temple to his cheeks and pulled away wet. He was crying, he realized, and then his hands started shaking. Lucinda cupped the back of his head with her hand and pulled his face into her shoulder, letting him curl up and release all the feelings he had been hiding from since they had been locked up.

She would have been an excellent mother.

**

Another month passed, maybe more

Lucinda stopped telling him stories. She started spending hours staring blankly at the cracks in the wall and sometimes when he asked her a question she wouldn't answer for ten minutes. He was losing her.

He didn't know what to do besides what she had done for him, which was talk. So he talked, and he spoke the truth. About his father, his childhood, about Joseph and about Michelle. He talked about David.

On the day he told her about being fourteen years old and falling to his knees in front of a boy in the year above him at military school their food stopped coming. There was no warning or special last meal, the guard just stopped coming by. The torch in the hall burned out and was not replaced, and it turned so dark that it was hard to tell whether his eyes were open or closed.

Jack held his hand against Lucinda's growling stomach and suddenly wished he had filled it with a child when he had the chance, because certainly that would have been less cruel then feeling her body shrivel up next to his.

He took to wrapping his hand around her wrist so if her pulse started to fade he would know. He didn't know what he would do if it did, but feeling her blood still beating beneath his fingers was reassuring.

“You'll see the sun again,” he whispered into her hair when she was no longer had the energy to speak, “you will see the sun and it will be beautiful.”

She laid across his lap in the dark, his fingers encasing her frail wrist, and he leaned his back against the wall. They were slipping away.

**

When Jack next opened his eyes he found himself squinting at a blurry shape with a crown of light bursting from behind his head and he hoped, briefly, that this was his angel, that he was to be taken to heaven.

“Jack?” He knew that voice. Someone touched his face, then his neck. “Guards, get help. Get a doctor. Now!”

He tried to move, tried to talk, tried to tell them to save Lucinda first, but he barely had the energy to keep his eyes open long enough for David Shepherd's face to come into focus in front of his.

He heard footsteps down the hall, and shouting. David clasped his shoulder and said, “You're going to be okay, Jack.”

Jack believed him

David Shepherd had never let him die before, not even when Jack asked him to, not even when Jack wanted him to.

David Shepherd would save them and this time, Jack was going to be grateful.


End file.
